Chile on Wednesday named the anti-colonialist Western The Settlers from first-time feature filmmaker Felipe Gálvez as its official entry for Best International Feature at the 2024 Academy Awards.
The film coming off a FIPRESCI Prize win at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, where it played in Un Certain Regard, joins a list of entrants that includes Smoke Sauna Sisterhood (Estonia), The Teachers’ Lounge (Germany), Concrete Utopia (South Korea) and Thunder (Switzerland), as previously announced.
Following forthcoming screenings at the Toronto Film Festival and the New York Film Festival, the pic will be released theatrically in North America by Mubi, which also holds distribution rights for the UK, Latin America, Turkey, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Benelux, and India, and will unveil further details as to its release plans at a later date.
Written by Gálvez and Antonia Girardi, in collaboration with Mariano Llinás, The Settler is set in Chile at the beginning of the 20th century, where a wealthy landowner hires three horsemen to mark out the perimeter of his extensive property and open a route to the Atlantic Ocean across vast Patagonia.
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